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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 MARCH 2023 9 INTERVIEW 'challenge of tact' take the case of gender-blind, age-blind, or race-blind casting (for instance, Maxine Peake or Michelle Terry in recent years as Hamlet; or Ian McKellen playing Hamlet while he's in his eight- ies). We forget that this sort of thing was happening decades, indeed centuries, ago. Sarah Siddons played the part of Hamlet many times in the eighteenth century (though, very interestingly, not on the London stage). As it happens, the first filmed performance we have of 'Hamlet', from 1900, has Sarah Bernhardt as the Prince. People flocked to those perfor- mances. And who wouldn't want to see either of those two great performers in the role? Something is generously at work there. True, this is the kind of move that tries to unsettle at- titudes. But I think that reader- ships and audiences will, in the main, be curious, and ready to give these kinds of revisitations a chance: if they see that they're not being done tokenistically, or merely faddishly, or for the sake of latter-day proprieties – and that there is, in fact, a new understanding that's thereby brought to the work; an added edge to the relevance of these texts and their capacities for re- interpretation. This, I think, is the real problem with the Dahl edits. The changes (certainly, those cited again and again in the press) came across as perplexing; worse, leaden. And Dahl's words were not so obviously problematic as what can be encountered in Flem- ing's work, with its depictions of women; or, say, 'Gone With the Wind' (the film even more than Margaret Mitchell's novel), with its representations of slav- ery and racism. There wasn't the perceived need for, let us say, trigger warnings, that become relevant in the case of 'Gone with the Wind' or, arguably, Fleming's novels. And Dahl himself is not leaden. Let's go to his texts (on whose magic one intervenes with trep- idation). The opening to his "Cinderella" is interesting in the context of what we have been discussing. I'm reading from 'Revolting Rhymes': "I guess you think you know this story. / You don't. The real one's much more gory. / The phoney one, the one you know, / Was cooked up years and years ago, / And made to sound all soft and sappy / Just to keep the children happy." We get the point – if any- thing, let's restore the old men- ace to the old stories – though perhaps we also get the subtle self-irony. Let's remember also that Dahl was himself happy to write proactively, directly, in support of certain causes. 'The Vicar of Nibbleswicke' – "writ- ten for the benefit of the Dys- lexia Institute", as the blurb has it – has a particular cleverness to it. It starts in an almost pe- destrian way, and then it sud- denly becomes uproariously funny, blending on the one hand that kind of playground humour and language play which has children (and adults) chortling merrily, with, on the other, a resolution that avoids any laboured messaging. Dahl may not have got it right in his private life and public statements – the problems there are well known, and Margaret Talbot's article in the New York- er from some years ago is pene- trating on the issues that emerge – but the books themselves have a truer wisdom. What about Homer, though? Are you concerned at what appears to be a growing 'intol- erance', among contemporary readers, to literary perspec- tives which in any way contrast with their own world-views? In her article on Dahl, Francine Prose refers, interestingly, to "teachable moments": in other words, those opportunities that arise when world-views around a text's constructions, and re- ception, conflict. Do we deal with that conflict by removing texts, or by reading more? Not, I'd like to think, the former. Similarly, with Homer: do we decolonize the canon by de- nuding it, or by refashioning it? There are rich and creative routes to refashioning: Marga- ret Atwood's 'The Penelopeia' pointed to one. 'This is the Can- on: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books', edited by Joan Anim-Adoo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay, points to an- other (I do, in all honesty, have some issues with this book: not because of the idea or the phi- losophy or the politics, but with the execution and some of its as- sumptions – but that's another discussion). In fact, what this whole contro- versy has got me thinking about more, is that question of 'tact'. I mentioned it at the start. Not, of course, the question of which version of a Dahl text (to get back to that), the original or the edited one, is most 'tactful' to buy as a gift, now that Puffin has decided to keep both options in print (some people will call that arrangement a fudge, others will call it a compromise). To put that another way: "Will they be offended if we gift them the original? Or will they be more offended if we give them the edited version? Oh, bother, I'll give them a Goosebumps in- stead. Oh, hang on..." There is a history, in literary criticism, to thinking about "critical tact", and what it de- mands: for instance, which methodological or theoretical tools to deploy in interpretation; or how to square the tact owed to certain groups of readerships, with the fidelity owed to a text; to its background, to its art. What all these questions come down to, in the end, is this: "To what, or to whom, is the great- er tact owed?" And, as it hap- pens, just this week there have been articles published in PM- LA (the journal of the Modern Languages Association) about "sensitivity" and its contempo- rary challenges. Not, to be clear, sensitivity as understood in the phrase "sensitivity readers". The sensitivity at play is not about retooling the language of literary texts, past and present, in propi- tiation of contemporary world- views. And in fairness, if we're going to discuss sensitivity readers, let's recognise that they are by no means all as they have been portrayed: jobsworths or com- missars in publishers' offices, blue pencilling everything that they prime themselves to be per- sonally or vicariously offended by. We cannot be badmouthing an entire practice, simply be- cause one instance of it is seen as 'insensitively' executed (the irony!) At their best, sensitivity read- ers offer another layer to the kind of literary editing that has been a part of the publishing in- dustry for years. For readers who are interested in this, an article in The Vulture, "What the job of a sensitivity reader is really like", is worth looking at. But, back to those articles in the PMLA, with titles like "Be- coming Sensitive", or "Sensi- tivity Training", or "Criticism as the Practice of a Commons", by Elaine Auyoung and Erica Fretwell and Joseph North, re- spectively. The articles speak about the balance between aes- thesis, "aesthetic education", "sensus communis", "emanci- patory cultural commitments", and how "one task facing critics today is to find a way to make aesthetic judgments without simply reinforcing pernicious power relations". What we see there, I think, are literary criticism and the humanities thinking through the 21-century challenge to critical tact: the responsibilities to different constituencies and their world-views, in our in- creasingly variegated societies with their complex and some- times irreconcilable demands. If there is any doubt about how those demands are growing ever more pressing, it's tell- ing that just in this very hour [Note: this interview occurred partly in person and partly via email], Gary Lineker has been suspended by the BBC from presenting Match of the Day, following his tweet criticis- ing the UK government's new asylum policy; while the New Yorker has published a fasci- nating piece by Katy Wald- man, on "What are we protect- ing children from by banning books?" (A good spur to critical thinking, that article.) Can we doubt that we're going to be hearing a lot more about how to understand sensitivi- ty and "free speech" in future? The Roald Dahl edits are just a small example – and a relatively benign one – of a far bigger and intractable set of issues. And, I fear, an easy distraction from confronting what looms larger in the culture wars – and the all too real wars – in the world to- day.